Congo Wikis

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Rosenblum's Cant and Stearns' Guild

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to Peter Rosenblum’s
latest broadside, a letter he addressed to the SEC excoriating my New York Times’
op-ed. The note she attached to the link said, “What did you do, run over his dog?!”

Now that I’ve read the letter, I can understand the impetus behind her question. It’s an odd piece of writing for a law professor to dispatch
to a body like the SEC, and not just because it contains a startling number
of grammatical errors (see over the fold for the [sic]s). In it, Rosenblum argues that the evidence I
provide of the harm caused by the law is impressionistic and selective. He has heard “similar claims over the course
of more than 20 years,” he tells the SEC, and he assures them that my comments provide
no basis on which to judge even the short-term impacts of the law.

I wasn't surprised that Rosenblum would take issue with my op-ed. He thought highly enough of the conflict minerals campaign to have issued a press release commending it back in March. But I am a little surprised at how he's gone about it. In fact, this letter to the SEC is the third time Rosenblum has taken to keyboard in opposition to the editorial. After it appeared, he published a letter in the New York Times stating that while DF-1502 wouldn’t solve the
problem, it did constitute a small but vital step in the right direction. My
claim that it was hurting the very people it was meant to help was "impressionistic," he wrote--there's that word again--and and my assertion that the Chinese would eventually step
in to pick up the slack in the mineral trade was “vague.”

He next left a comment on Stearns’ blog suggesting that I
had become mentally incapacitated during my trip to the Congo. I wish I were speaking hyperbolically, but here--judge for yourself: “Many of us have
struggled during field research, when the most recent grievance overwhelms all
others. It makes sense for the people we encounter, but long-time Congo
watchers presumably have a sense of context. David Aronson seems to have lost
all perspective.”

After he published those notes, but before I’d seen his
letter to the SEC, I sent Rosenblum an email pointing out that we had met on
several occasions, including in Kinshasa in 1997, and I told him that I hoped we’d have
the chance to debate the issue more thoughtfully. As I wrote on my blog, “I
know Peter. I respect Peter. He seems to have responded more to the
editor-chosen title of my op-ed than to anything I wrote. I hope he'll provide
a more thoughtful critique in the future.” A couple of weeks later, I was delighted when the New York Bar Association invited us, quite out of the blue, to have that very debate at their headquarters in Manhattan. Unfortunately,
Rosenblum backed out at the last moment, citing prior commitments, and the debate went ahead without him. I then invited him to elaborate on his criticism here, in my blog; I even promised to let him have the last word. Rosenblum
failed to respond to that invitation or to several follow-up emails and
telephone calls. (See after the fold for the sequence.) It’s because of his silence
that I am writing now.

Part of the difficulty of responding to Rosenblum's criticism is that its intensity isn't matched by a corresponding clarity. For example, his main criticism is that the evidence I provide is "impressionistic." But it's not clear precisely what he means by that. I assume that he means that it's sufficiently uninformed and selective as to be unreliable. But I'm left wondering why he would think that to be the case, and what evidence he has that contradicts mine. I reported what I saw and heard over the course of four weeks, visits to seven mining sites, and discussions with dozens of Congolese stakeholders and experts. What, precisely, does Rosenblum think I got wrong? The advocates themselves have stipulated that the law--or more precisely, the resulting embargo--caused a precipitous drop in mineral exports. What does Rosenblum think happened to the million or so people in the region who depended on that trade for their livelihood? What does he think of the increasing number of journalists and human rights groups who have corroborated my reporting, such as the Economist, Reuters, the UN Group of Experts, and tk? And what does he think of the many Congolese who have testified to the law's deleterious consequences? If he has ideas on the subject, he doesn't say.[1]

Unfortunately, labeling my piece "impressionistic" is about as substantive as Rosenblum gets. His letter to the SEC, for example, reiterates the "impressionistic" criticism in half a paragraph; the rest of the letter is concerned with setting forth his own credentials as an expert on the country. Indeed, the letter makes it sound like Rosenblum believes the SEC ought to believe him because of his impressive-sounding credentials--even in the absence of any argument! If I didn't know him, I'd think this the work of a crank, albeit of the tufted, tenured variety. But I do know Rosenblum, and I know that he is capable of writing concise and effective take-downs; see here for an example [link tk]. Blithely asserting that I’ve lost my marbles, or that I’m not as credentialed as he is, doesn’t do much to advance the substance or the tenor of the debate.

I happened to mention these frustrations to the friend who originally sent me the link to Rosenblum’s SEC letter. She told me I needn’t be too concerned: “You’ve reduced
an Ivy League law professor to several iterations of name calling and rank pulling. Now, apparently, you've forced him to retreat into an embarrassed
silence. It’s not you who has anything to worry about.”

In the meantime, Stearns seems to be pulling back on his
initial criticism of my piece. In a Wall Street Journal book review, he admits that
the law has put tens of thousands of people out of work. He has also refused opportunities to defend his own account of how the law might work. You’ll remember that he suggested that the main mineral
exporters, the comptoir owners, threatened by the loss of income, would pressure the central government to provide better security throughout the region. I doubted from the outset that comptoir owners had that kind of pull and wondered, if they did, why they hadn't used that power to put an end to the conflicts a long time earlier. I haven't seen Stearns make any subsequent defense of his argument, but I haven't heard him repudiate it either.

Stearns is a generally reliable guy, thorough and accurate.
But I’ve reluctantly called him out once or twice in the past for fence sitting. Back in
2003, he wrote a piece for the International Crisis Group in which he
alternately called the continued presence of the FDLR/ex-genocidaires in the
Kivus a “pretext” and the “explanation” for Rwanda’s incursions into the Congo. "Well, which is it?" I wrote to him. If it’s the former, we need to pressure Rwanda
to back off. If the latter, we need to work harder on repatriating the FDLR.
Surely an analysis of how Rwanda has behaved inside the Congo will go far
toward telling us where the truth lies. My own reading is that the FDLR’s presence
is largely pretextual, and that Rwanda’s main business in Congo since 1999 has
been plunder on the one hand and territorial control on the other. Or so
memory serves me of that conversation: I no longer have access to the email
account in which it transpired.

And if memory serves, I wasn’t able to elicit much of a
response from Stearns then, either, except for a retreat into vagueness. Look,
I respect Stearns enough to believe he isn’t fence sitting to retain his viability
on the issues, but there are times, too, that I want to remind him of what Dante thought
of neutrality.

[1] It's a little hard to divine, but at one or two points Rosenblum appears to suggest that my informants can't be speaking accurately or truthfully about the law's impacts because he has heard Congolese voice similar complaints about their lives in other contexts. It's true that Congolese have complained, for a very long time, about their inability to pay school fees, afford health care, and even buy food. But does the fact that Congolese are desperately poor--and have been for ages--mean that the miners haven't been impacted by the mining embargo? Would Rosenblum have been more convinced if they'd come up with different, and more original sounding complaints? It's a silly question, I know, but I'm grasping at straws: I really don't understand what Rosenblum is getting at, otherwise.

The history of my--alas!--one-sided conversation with Rosenblum, in which he attacks me publicly, gets invited to discuss/debate the issues, and retreats into an Olympian silence.

Rosenblum's letter to The New York Times:

To the Editor:

The long-term development of Congo depends on channeling
potentially vast mining revenues into long-term development. At this moment,
the mineral wealth of the eastern Congo feeds conflict and corruption, with a
few crumbs falling to the local population; almost nothing goes to government
coffers.

The “conflict mineral” provisions of the Dodd-Frank
financial reform law, which put the burden on companies to know and disclose
the source of their supply, are a small but vital step in shifting the
incentives away from the warlords. They won’t solve the problem, but their part
in “devastating” an already devastated land is overstated.

David Aronson’s impressionistic account of harms and vague
reference to the specter of China’s seizing of business don’t justify giving
initiative back to the warlords.

PETER ROSENBLUM
New York, Aug. 8, 2011

The writer, a professor at Columbia Law School, is a
consultant to the Carter Center on a project regarding industrial mining in
Congo.

Rosenblum's comment in CongoSiasa, a blog by Jason Stearns
August 11, 2011

Jason went pretty easy on David Aronson. Many of us have
struggled during field research, when the most recent grievance overwhelms all
others. It makes sense for the people we encounter, but long-time Congo
watchers presumably have a sense of context. David Aronson seems to have lost
all perspective. The Eastern Congo was not 'devastated' in the last six months
and certainly not by the US Congress.

I respectfully submit this letter and the attached comment
(published as a 'Letter to the Editor' in the NYT August 15, 2011) regarding
the proposed regulations to implement Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall
Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the "Dodd-Frank Act" or
the "Conflict Minerals Provision" or "Section 1502"), which
mandates certain disclosures concerning conflict minerals that originate in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo ("DRC") or an adjoining [sic].[1]

I am a Professor at Columbia Law School, and the faculty
director of the Human Rights Institute, here [sic].[2] For
more than 20 years 1 have been working on issues of human rights and
development in the DRC, first [sic] Human Rights Watch and other major
international NGOs and, subsequently, with a variety of organizations including
the UN, USAID and The Carter Center. Since 1998, I have increasingly focused my
attention on the relationship among [sic][3] natural
resource extraction, human rights and development. Since the 2006 elections in
the DRC, I have been collaborating closely with The Carter Center on a project
concerning industrial mining there.

I write in response to those who criticize Section 1502 for
its short term impact on Congolese livelihoods and, in particular, claims by
David Aronson, writing in the New York Times on August 8, 2011. Mr. Aronson
suggests Section 1502 is to blame for loss of livelihood [sic][4]
and opportunities in the DRC; he blames Congress for “devastating” the region.
His evidence is impressionistic, drawn selectively from local actors. In my
work, I have heard similar claims over the course of more than 20 years. Mr.
Aronson's comments do not provide a basis on which to reach judgments, even
regarding the short term impacts that he claims to address.

Moreover, the value of Section 1502 is its contribution to
long term impacts [sic].[5]
No single measure can reverse 15 years of war and turn natural resources into
the engine of development. Without the transparency, supply chain due diligence
and incentives for corporate responsibility required by Section 1502, however,
those outcomes are significantly less likely.

Finally, many are arguing for delayed implementation of the
regulations. In my view, such a delay would be inconsistent with the goals of the
legislation and would arguably enhance incentives to game the system and avoid
ultimate compliance.

[1] Missing word?[2] Professor, alas, is a common noun. And a weird way to phrase the sentence, overall.[3] Between ain't just for twosies, despite what your h.s. english teach might have told you.[4] Faulty parallelism[5] Its "contribution to long term impacts?" Surely he means that the contribution of 1502 lies in its long-term impact, or some such.

Peter,
This is David Aronson, the fellow who lost all perspective after his recent
trip to the Congo. We've met a few times actually, the first in Kinshasa in
1997, and then at a few GLPF meetings. I understand you were invited to a panel
at the New York Bar Association on conflict minerals, but that you're not sure
if you'll be able to attend.
For what it's worth, I'd like to extend my hope that you'll be there. I think
it would be useful to have the chance to debate the issue with you in a public
forum.
In any case, I hope to see you again soon.
David

I just came across your letter to the SEC. You clearly have
strong feelings about me the subject. If you'd like to
elaborate on them, I'll be more than happy to publish them in my blog. I
promise to publish whatever you send in its entirety, and if I do respond to
it, to give you the option of having the final word.

I ask because it does seem as if we're fated not to cross
each other's path any time soon.

Cheers,

-d

Rosenblum failed to respond to this and several subsequent emails
and phone calls.

About Me

David grew up in Ibadan, Abidjan, and Montreal. He is based in Kinshasa where he works on a public health project. He has published articles and essays on the Congo in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere.